Queer Ecology

This event delves into the mystical and exciting world of Queer Ecology. Unknown to many, we will commence with a live streamed introductory lecture about this concept by the academic and artist Sabine LeBel. Afterwards we are expecting Lou Lou Sainsbury to talk about her interdisciplinary art practice with specific focus on listening, sensuality and transing*. Additionally their work “my hole is the place where i call myself mother” will be screened, telling the story of a singing, flaming meteorite and an alien fungus that translates the voices of trees. Lastly, designer Noam Youngrak Son will guide a creative workshop of a speculative co-creation made out of edible flesh. The audience will explore notions of race, ecology, and queerness in making an organism together.

Featuring:

Sabine LeBel  slebel@unb.ca

Dr. Sabine LeBel is an Assistant Professor in the Culture and Media Studies Department at the University of New Brunswick Fredericton. Working in the area of environmental media studies, her research is in the areas of waste, affect, and the visual. Her research has been published in Globalizations, NANO: North American Notes Online, and Canadian Women Studies/ les cahiers de la femme, among others. She also has an art practice, mostly consisting of video work, with pieces screening internationally at Inside Out Festival (Toronto), Out on Screen (Vancouver), and Cineffable (Paris), among others. In 2016, with Casey Burkholder, she started the Fredericton Feminist Film Collective, dedicated to making, screening and talking about works by and for queers, trans folks and women. 

Lou Lou Sainsbury @loulousainsbury : loulousainsbury.com

Lou Lou Sainsbury is a transfeminine* artist based in Margate, UK & Rotterdam, NL, working in live-performance, video, writing and textiles. She identifies as a time traveller, making things that unwrite histories of living beings into mythopoeic dreamscapes, informed by queer and ecological activisms. Her work questions how we can become better listeners, and how bodies (human and more-than-human) can trouble historicity and geography, often writing slippery, trans* narratives for (im)possible worlds in the realm of science-fiction and gothic horror.

Recently graduated from the Dutch Art Institute, she was an associate artist at Open School East in 2017 after completing the BA in Moving Image at the University of Brighton in 2016. She was awarded Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme (2021/22) and exhibited individually at Well Projects, Margate (2020). Recent performances and group exhibitions include: Centre for Contemporary Arts Prague (2021); Yaby and La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Nottingham Contemporary; Tate Modern, London; Yaby, Madrid (all 2019); and Flat Time House, London (2018).

Noam Youngrak Son @noam_yr : http://www.d-act.org/

Noam Youngrak Son is a designer based in Ghent and Eindhoven. They inscribe myths for the underrepresented in various mediums, from books to performances to 3D printed sex toys. They are excited about the unexpectedness that a well-designed fiction can open up, and critical political discussions that it may cultivate. They use their capability as a designer to visualize and materialize the setup for the technological & ecological bodies in their fiction to play roles in. Their identity as a queer person of color is one of the crucial axes of their design practices.